I was talking with a co-worker about C and C++ and he claimed that C is object-oriented, but I claimed that it was not. I know that you can do object-oriented-like things in C, but C++ is a true object-oriented language.
What are your thoughts?
Also, it triggered discussion on who decides what it means to be object-oriented and that it's tough to say what object-oriented really officially means. What are you thoughts on this?
C is a object based language, it does not support many features of object oriented languages such as inheritance, polymorphism etc.
Though C itself was bulit as procedural language (it "thinks" in terms of procedure: You first execute function A then you pass the output to function B etc. it supports "out of the box" only functional program flow), It's possible to implement OOP over C (in OOP, the story is driven by Objects and their responsibilities rather than functions and their calling order). In fact, some early C++ implementations were translating the code to some C code and then building it. However, sometimes you must use C (for Embedded devices / GPU languages that don't support C++ etc). And you want OOP. I'd suggest you to check out COOP - my C OOP lightweight yet powerful framework for C object-oriented programming.
C is not object oriented. C++ is not object oriented. Let me explain: Object Oriented is an extension to Simula's old fashion event driven subset. Real Object Oriented are functional and reflective because Object Oriented is really a group of paradigms (event driven, functional, reflective). Only four language are really object oriented and these are Lisp,Smalltalk,Ruby and Ocaml. Perl lags between because its not functional. Scala is not reflective so also lags behind. C++ is only event driven with some Simula like facilities but its completely structured programming language and its not declarative or even matchs real world. Object Oriented matchs real world with Functional (Maths), Event Driven (Conversations) and Reflectiveness (Evolution). C++ only has conversations. C++ is not declarative like maths or doesnt evolve like life. C++ only converses like people. C++ is like an idiot that doesnt know how maths work or how life evolves.
